If you travel throughout Negros Oriental, your car’s stereo will be picking up FM radio signals anywhere along the way. Most likely, you will be listening to radio stations broadcasting from Negros Oriental.
That’s because aside from the legitimate radio stations here, there are also 16 FM radio stations that have been broadcasting illegally in the Province.
Which means that these radio stations, most of which are operating from towns outside Dumaguete, are broadcasting without the required permits from the National Telecommunications Commission, and without the franchises from the Philippine Congress.
Government regulates the airwaves used by FM radio stations because the airwaves are the property of the state.
The NTC is mandated to allocate frequencies for radio stations, like 95.1 for station DYSR, to ensure, among others, they do not cause radio interference (noise) when their numbers on the dial are too close.
It is no surprise that most of these radio stations that operate illegally are owned ironically by the politicians.
This situation is not unique to Negros Oriental. It is happening all over the country — which surely does not make it right.
Instead of shutting them down, however, the NTC is advising them (four of the 16) to explain their side in mediation proceedings scheduled for January.
Lawyer Alan Felix Macaraya of the NTC-Central Visayas legal office said the purpose of the mediation proceedings is to stop the illegal operation of these stations.
We are happy that NTC is finally doing something about this. These radio stations, after all, have been operating for so many years now, giving the impression that the NTC was toothless.
But we must remember that on May 5 just last year, the NTC pulled off what everyone thought was an impossible task under previous administrations: it yanked broadcast giant ABS-CBN off the air for the reason that it failed to get a congressional franchise.
ABS-CBN lost millions of pesos as a result of that shutdown, and all the king’s horses and all the king’s men wouldn’t put ABS-CBN back on air.
If NTC was able to disband a giant broadcast media network, surely it can padlock these illegal FM radio stations in our midst?
Let’s see what happens next.
